Paul Enock's Blog - Posts Tagged "paroxysm"

Each time I finish a book I think to myself that's it; I've now exhausted all the interesting scenarios. It would be pointless to start repeating myself and frustrating from my readers point of view. Then a new line of thought develops...

This latest book is a little different from all the others. I try to make my books scientifically believable, I am an Engineer after all. This latest book is actually based on a true episode from history and the extraordinary attitudes and practices of the day: the astonishing way Victorian men controlled and manipulated their womenfolk.

Throughout history, men have failed to understand their women and this phenomenon seems to have reached a peak in the latter half of the nineteenth century when the prudish Victorians couldn't bring themselves to accept the fact that their delicate and sensitive females could experience anything like lust or an orgasm. They were also tempted to attribute any abnormal behaviour or dissent by their women, such as disagreeing with men, as a symptom of some sort of 'curable' disease peculiar to their sex. The name of this disease was 'hysteria', a condition that could easily land the unfortunate lady in an asylum, and the common way of relieving it was for the doctor to induce an orgasm, or a paroxysm as they would describe it. Such a nervous spasm was not in their minds a sexual response, women didn't have sexual responses. It was merely an involuntary reaction to the release of female 'semen' and had the benefit of relieving the accumulation of fluids in the woman's pelvic area that was contaminating the blood and causing the problems.

The usual way of inducing a paroxysm was manually, a time consuming and exhausting job for the physician, but other methods were developed using water and steam driven devices. There were alternative cures too; dark, horrific cures.

This book, A Victorian Cure for the Disease of Love, explores a young woman's experiences when she has the misfortune to fall in love with someone who is inconvenient from her guardian's point of view. After the story, the book includes a short treatise on Victorian hysteria and the related ailment, masturbation, for those readers who disbelieve the 'facts'.